"I like to stand in this great airAnd see the sun go down;It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town!"
"I like to stand in this great airAnd see the sun go down;It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town!"
"I like to stand in this great airAnd see the sun go down;It shows me a bright veil to wearAnd such a pretty gown.Oh, I can see a playmate thereFar up in Splendour Town!"
"I like to stand in this great air
And see the sun go down;
It shows me a bright veil to wear
And such a pretty gown.
Oh, I can see a playmate there
Far up in Splendour Town!"
Little Child began it with me, but her voice trailed away. I thought that in the darkness were many gentle presences—Little Child's tender breathing, the brushing wings of hurrying dreams, and perhaps that other—"not quite my sister," but a shadowy little Margaret.
Afterward, Miggy and Peter and I sat together for a little while, but Peter had fallen in a silence. And presently Aunt Effie came home, and on the porch—which seemed not yet to have escaped—she told us about having broken her needle and left her shears at her neighbour's. While Peter ran over to Mis' Holcomb's for the shears, I had a word with Miggy.
"Miggy!" I said, "don't you see?"
"See what?" she wanted to know, perversely.
"How Peter would love to have Little Child, too?" I said.
She laughed a little, and was silent; and laughed again.
"He was funny and nice," she admitted; "and wasn't Little Child funny not to bless him?"
"Because he is nice enough," I reminded her.
Miggy laughed once more—I had never seen her in so tender and feminine a mood. And this may have been partly due to the new frock, though I cannot think that it was entirely this. But abruptly she shook her head.
"Peter's father went by just before you came in," she said. "He—couldn't hardly walk. What if I was there to get supper for him when he got home? I never could—I never could...."
By the time Peter and I were out alone on Daphne Street again, the sitting rooms in all the houses were dark, with a look of locked front doors—as if each house had set its lips together with, "We are a home and you are not."
Peter looked out on all this palpable householdry.
"See the lights upstairs," he said; "everybody's up there, hearing their prayers and giving 'em fever medicine. Yes, sir, Great Scott! Shorty Burns and Tony Thomas and Dutchie Wade—they ain't good for a thing in the cannery. And yet they know...."
Between church service and Sunday School we of the First church have so many things to attend to that no one can spare a moment.
"Reverent things, not secular," Calliope explains, "plannin' for church chicken-pie suppers an' Christmas bazaars and like that; but not a word about a picnic, not even if they was to be one o' Monday sunrise."
To be sure, this habit of ours occasionally causes a contretemps. As when one morning Mis' Toplady arrived late and, in a flurry, essayed to send up to the pulpit by the sexton a Missionary meeting notice to be read. Into this notice the minister plunged without the precaution of first examining it, and so delivered aloud:—
"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags."See Abigail about enough forks for her table."Look around for my rubbers."Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags."See Abigail about enough forks for her table."Look around for my rubbers."Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags."See Abigail about enough forks for her table."Look around for my rubbers."Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
"See Mis' Sykes about bringing wiping cloths and dish-rags.
"See Abigail about enough forks for her table.
"Look around for my rubbers.
"Dun Mame Holcomb for her twenty cents."
Not until he reached the fourth item was the minister stopped by the agonized rustle in a congregation that had easily recognized Mis' Toplady's "between services" list of reminder, the notice of the forthcoming meeting being safe in her hymn book.
Still we persist in our Sabbath conferences when "everybody is there where you want 'em an' everybody can see everybody an' no time lost an' no party line listening"; and it is then that those who have been for some time away from the village receive their warmest welcome. I am not certain that the "I must get down to church and see everybody" of a returned neighbour does not hold in fair measure the principles of familyhood and of Christ's persuadings to this deep comradeship.
It was in this time after church that we welcomed Calliope one August Sunday when she had unexpectedly come down from town on the Saturday night. And later, when the Sunday-school bell had rung, I waited with her in the church while she looked up her Bible, left somewhere in the pews. When she had found it, she opened it in a manner of eager haste, and I inadvertently saw pasted to the inside cover a sealed letter, superscription down, for whose safety she had been concerned. I had asked her to dine with me, and as we walked home together she told me about the letter and what its sealed presence in her Bible meant.
"I ain't ever read it," Calliope explained to me wistfully. "Every one o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle has got one, an' none of us has ever read 'em. It ain't my letter, so to say. It's one o' the Jem Pitlaw collection. The postmark," she imparted, looking up at me proudly, "is Bombay, India."
At my question about the Jem Pitlaw collection she laughed deprecatingly, and then she sighed. ("Ain't it nice," she had once said to me, "your laughs hev a sigh for a linin', an' sighs can hev laughin' for trimmin'. Only trouble is, most folks want to line with trimmin's, an' they ain't rill durable, used that way.")
"Jem Pitlaw," Calliope told me now, "used to be schoolmaster here—the kind that comes from Away an' is terrible looked up to on that account, but Jem deserved it. He knew all there wastoknow, an' yet he thought we knew some little things, too. We was all rill fond of him, though he kept to himself, an' never seemed to want to fall in love, an' not many of us knew him well enough to talk to at all familiar. But when he went off West on a vacation, an' didn't come back, an' never come back, an' then died, Friendship Village mourned for him,—sincere, though no crape,—an' missed him enormous.
"He'd had a room at Postmaster Sykes's—thatwas when he was postmaster first an' they was still humble an' not above the honest penny. An' Jem Pitlaw left two trunks an' a sealed box to their house. An' when he didn't come back in two years, Silas Sykes moved the things out of the spare room over to the post-office store loft. An' there they set, three years on end, till we got word Jem was dead—the very week o' the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle's Ten Cent Tropical Fête. Though, rilly, the Tropical Fête wasn't what you might say 'tropical.' It was held on the seventeenth of January, an' that night the thermometer was twenty-four degrees below on the bank corner. Nor it wasn't rilly what you might say a Fête, either. But none o' the Circle regretted them lacks. A lack is as good as a gift, sometimes.
"We'd started the Foreign Missionary Circle through Mis' Postmaster Sykes gettin' her palm. I donno what there is about palms, but you know the very name makes some folks think thoughts 'way outside their heads, an' not just stuffy-up inside their own brains. When I hear 'palm,' I sort o' feel like my i-dees got kind o' wordy wings an' just went it without me. An' that was the way with more than me, I found out. Nobody in Friendship Village hed a palm, but we'd all seen pictures an' hankered—like you do. An' all of a sudden Mis' Sykes got one, like she gets her new hat, sometimes,without a soul knowin' she's thinkin' 'hat' till she flams out in it. Givin' surprise is breath an' bread to that woman. She unpacked the palm in the kitchen, an' telephoned around, an' we all went over just as we was an' set down there an' looked at it an' thought 'Palm'! You can't realize how we felt, all of us, if you ain't lived all your life with nothin' but begonias an' fuchsias from November to April, an' sometimes into May. But we was all mixed up about 'em, now we see one. Some hed heard dates grew on palms. Others would have it it was cocoanuts. Still more said they was natives of the equator, an' give nothin' but shade. So it went. But after a while Mis' Timothy Toplady spoke up with that way o' comin' downstairs on her words an' rilly gettin' to a landin':—
"'They's quite a number o' things,' she says, 'that I want to do so much it seems like I can't die without doin' 'em. But I guess prob'ly I will die without. Folks seems to drop off leavin' lots of doin's undone. An' one o' my worst is, I want to see palm trees growin' in hot lands—big spiky leaves pointin' into the blue skylike fury. 'Seems if I could do that,' s'she, 'I'd take in one long breath that'd make me all lungs an' float me up an' off.'
"We all laughed, but we knew what she meant well enough, because we all felt the same way. Ithink most North folks do—like they was cocoanuts an' dates in our actions, 'way back. An' so we was all ready for Mis' Toplady's idee when it come—which is the most any idee can expect:—
"'I tell you what,' s'she, 'le's hev a Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle, an' get read up on them tropical countries. The only thing I really know about the tropics is what comes to me unbeknownst when I smell my tea rose. I've always been meanin' to take an interest in missions,' says she.
"So we started it, then an' there, an' she an' I was the committee to draw out a constitution an' decide what officers should be elected an' do the general creatin'. We made it up that Mis' Sykes should be the president—that woman is a born leader, and, as a leader, you can depend on the very back of her head. An' at last we went off to the minister that then was to ask him what to take up.
"'Most laudable,' s'he, when he'd heard. 'Well, now, what country is it you're most interested in?' he says. 'Some island of the sea, I s'pose?' he asks, bright.
"'We're interested in palms,' Mis' Timothy Toplady explained it to him frank, 'an' we want to study about the missionaries in some country where they's dates an' cocoanuts an' oaseses.'
"He smiled at that, sweet an' deep—I know it seemed to me as if he knew more about what wewanted than we knew ourselves. Because they's some ministers that understands that Christianity ain't all in the bottle labelled with it. Some of it is labelled 'ointment,' an' some 'perfume,' an' some just plain kitchen flavourin'. An' a good deal of it ain't labelled at all.
"I forget what country it was we did study. But they was nine to ten of us, an' we met every week, an' I tell you the time wa'n't wasted. We took things in lavish. I know Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss said that after belongin' to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle she could never feel the same absent-minded sensation again when she dusted her parlour shells. An' Mis' Toplady said when she opened her kitchen cabinet an' smelt the cinnamon an' allspice out o' the perforated tops, 'most always, no matter how mad she was, she broke out in a hymn, like 'When All Thy Mercies,' sheer through knowin' how allspice was born of God an' not made of man. An' Mis' Sykes said when she read her Bible, an' it talked about India's coral strand, it seemed like, through knowin' what a reef was, she was right there on one, with her Lord. I felt the same way, too—though I'd always felt the same way, for that matter—I always did tip vanilla on my handkerchief an' pretend it was flowers an' that I'd gone down South for the cold months. An' it got so that when the minister give out a text thathad geography in it, like the Red Sea, or Beer-elim, or 'a place called The Fair Haven,' the Ladies Foreign Missionary Circle would look round in our seats an' nod to each other, without it showin', because we knew that we knew, extra special, just what God was talkin' about. I tell you, knowledge makes you alive at places where you didn't know there was such a place.
"In five months' time we felt we owed so much to the Ladies' Foreign Missionary Circle that it was Mis' Sykes suggested we give the Ten Cent Tropical Fête, an' earn five dollars or so for missions.
"'We know a great deal about the tropics now,' she says, 'an' I propose we earn a missionary thank-offering. Coral an' cocoanuts an' dates an' spices isn't all the Lord is interested in, by any means,' s'she. 'An' the winter is the time to give a tropic fête, when folks are thinkin' about warm things natural.'
"We voted to hev the fête to Mis' Sykes's because it was too cold to carry the palm out. We went into it quite extensive—figs an' dates an' bananas an' ginger for refreshments, an' little nigger dolls for souvenirs, an' like that. It was quite a novel thing for Friendship, an' everybody was takin' an interest an' offerin' to lend Japanese umbrellas an' Indian baskets an' books on the South Sea, an' a bamboo chair with an elephant crocheted in thetidy. An' then, bein' as happenin's always crowd along in flocks, what come that very week o' the fête but a letter from an old aunt of Jem Pitlaw's, out West. An' if Jem hadn't been dead almost ever since he left Friendship! an' the aunt wrote that we should sell his things to pay for keepin' 'em, as she was too poor to send for 'em an' hadn't any room if she wasn't.
"I donno whether you know what rill excitement is, but if you don't, you'd ought to drop two locked trunks an' a sealed box into a town the size o' Friendship Village, an' leave 'em there goin' on five years, an' then die an' let 'em be sold. That'll show you what a pitch true interest can get het up to. All of a sudden the Tropical Fête was no more account than the telephone ringin' when a circus procession is going by. Some o' the Ladies' Missionary was rill indignant, an' said we'd ought to sue for repairin' rights, same as when you're interfered with in business. Mis' Sykes, she done her able best, too, but nothin' would do Silas but he must offer them things for sale on the instant. 'The time,' s'he, firm, 'to do a thing is now, while the interest is up. An' in this country,' s'he, '"now" don't stay "now" more'n two minutes at a time.'
"So he offered for sale the contents of them three things—the two trunks an' the sealed box—unsight, unseen, on the day before the Fête was to be. Onlyone thing interfered with the 'unsight, unseen' business: the sealed box had got damp an' broke open, an' what was inside was all showin'.
"Mis' Sykes an' I saw it on the day o' the sale. Most o' the Circle was to her house finishin' up the decorations for the Fête so's to leave the last day clear for seein' to the refreshments, an' her an' I run over to the post-office store for some odds an' ends. Silas had brought the two trunks an' the box down from the loft so to give 'em some advertisin'. An' lookin' in the corner o' the broke box we could see, just as plain as plain, wasletters. Letters in bunches, all tied up, an' letters laid in loose—they must 'a' been full a hundred of 'em, all lookin' mysterious an' ready to tell you somethin', like letters will. I know the looks o' the letters sort o' went to my head, like the news of Far Off. An' I hated seein' Jem's trunks there, with his initials on, appearin' all trustin' an' as if they thought he was still alive.
"But that wasn't the worst. They was three strangers there in the store—travellin' men that had just come in on the Through, an' they was hangin' round the things lookin' at 'em, as if they had the right to. This town ain't very much on the buy, an' we don't hev many strangers here, an' we ain't rill used to 'em. An' it did seem too bad, I know we thought, that them three should hev happened in on the day of a private Friendship Village sale thatdidn't concern nobody else but one, an' him dead. An' we felt this special when one o' the men took a-hold of a bunch o' the letters, an' we could see the address of the top one, to Jem Pitlaw, wrote thin an' tiny-fine, like a woman. An' at that Mis' Sykes says sharp to her husband:—
"'Silas Sykes, you ain't goin' to sell them letters?'
"'Yes, ma'am, I am,' Silas snaps, like he hed a right to all the letters on earth, bein' he was postmaster of Friendship Village. 'Letters,' Silas give out, 'is just precisely the same as books, only they ain't been through the expense of printin'. No differ'nce. No differ'nce!'—Silas always seems to think repeatin' a thing over'll get him somewheres, like a clock retickin' itself. 'An',' he says, 'I'm goin' to sell 'em for what they'll bring, same as the rest o' the things, an' you needn't to say one word.' An' bein' as Silas was snappin', not only as a postmaster but as a husband, Mis' Sykes, she kep' her silence. Matrimony an' politics both in one man is too much for any woman to face.
"Well, we two went back to Mis' Sykes's all het up an' sad, an' told the Circle about Jem Pitlaw's letters. An' we all stopped decoratin' an' set down just where we was an talked about what an awful thing it seemed. I donno as you'll sense it as strong as we did. It was more a feelin' than a wordin'.Letters—bein' sold an' read out loud an' gettin'known about. It seemed like lookin' in somebody's purse before they're dead.
"'I should of thought,' Mis' Sykes says, 'that Silas regardin' bein' postmaster as a sacred office would have made him do differ'nt. An' I know he talked that right along before he got his appointment. "Free Private Secretary to the People," an' "Trusted Curator of Public Communication," he put it when he was goin' around with his petition,' says she, grievin'.
"'Well,' says Mis' Amanda Toplady—I rec'lect she hed been puttin' up a big Japanese umbrella, an' she looked out from under it sort o' sweet an' sincere an' dreamy—'you've got to be a woman an' you've got to live in a little town before you know what a letter really is. I don't think these folks that hev lots o' mail left in the front hall in the mornin'—an' sometimes get one that same afternoon—knowsabout letters at all. An' I don't believe any man ever knows, sole except when he's in love. To sense what a letter is you've got to be a woman without what-you-may-say much to enjoy; you've got to hear the train whistle that might bring you one; you've got to calculate how long it'll take 'em to distribute the mail, an' mebbe hurry to get your bread mixed, or your fried-cakes out o' the lard, or your cannin' where you can leave it—an' then go change your shoes an' slip on another skirt,an' poke your hair up under your hat so's it won't show, an' go down to the post-office in the hot sun, an' see the letter through the glass, there in your own box, waitin' for you. That minute, when your heart comes up in your throat, I tell you, is gettin' a letter.'
"We all knew this is so—every one of us.
"'It's just like that when you write 'em, only felt differ'nt,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I do mine to my sister a little at a time—I keep it back o' the clock in the kitchen an' hide the pencil inside the clock door, so's it won't walk off, the way pencils do at our house. An' then, right in the midst of things, be it flour or be it suds, I can scratch down what comes in my head, till I declare sometimes I can hardly mail it for readin' it over an' thinkin' how she'll like to get it.'
"'My, my!' says Mis' Sykes, reminiscent, ''specially since Silas has been postmaster an' we've had so much to do with other people's letters, I've been so hungry for letters of my own that I've wrote for samples. I can do that with a level conscience because, after all, you do get a new dress now an' then. But I couldn't answer advertisements, same as some, when I didn't mean true—just to get the letters back. That don't seem to me rill honest.'
"An' then I owned up.
"'Last week, when I paid my taxes,' I says, 'I whipped out o' the clerk's office quick, sole so's he'd hev to mail me my tax receipt. But he didn't do it. He sent it over by their hired girl that noon. I love letters like I do my telephone bell an' my friends,' I know I says.
"An' there was all that hundred letters or so—letters that somebody had put love in for Jem Pitlaw, an' that he'd read love out of an' saved 'em—there they was goin' to be sold for all Friendship Village to read, includin' some that hadn't even known him, mebbe more than to speak to.
"We wasn't quite through decoratin' when supper time come, so we stayed on to Mis' Sykes's for a pick-up lunch, et in the kitchen, an' finished up afterwards. Most of 'em could do that better than they could leave their work an' come down again next mornin'—men-folks can always get along for supper, bein' it's not a hot meal.
"'Ain't it wonderful,' says Mis' Toplady, thoughtful, 'here we are, settin' 'round the kitchen table at Mis' Postmaster Sykes's in Friendship Village. An' away off in Arabia or Asia or somewhere that I ain't sure they is any such place, is somebody settin' that never heard of us nor we of him, an' he's goin' to hev our five dollars from the Tropical Fête to-morrow night, an' put it to work doin' good.'
"'It makes sort of a connection, don't it?' saysMis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'There they are an' here we are. Ain't it strange? 'Seems like our doin' this makes us feel nearer to them places. I donno but that,' says she, noddin', 'is the start of what it means about the lion and the lamb layin' down together.'
"'Oh!'says Mis' Toplady, 'I tell you the Foreign Missionary Circle has been next best togoin'. 'Seems sometimes as if I've 'most been somewheres an' seen palms a-growin' an' a-wavin' an' a red sky back. Don't it to you? I've dreamed o' them places all my life, an' I ain't never had anything but Friendship Village, an' I don't know now that Arabia an' Asia an' India is rilly fitted in, the way they look on the map. An' so with some more. But if so be they are, then,' she says, 'we owe it to the Foreign Missionary Circle that we've got that far towards seein' 'em.'
"An' we all agreed, warm, excep' Mis' Sykes, who was the hostess an' too busy to talk much; but we knew how she felt. An' we said some more about how wonderful things are, there in Mis' Sykes's kitchen while we et.
"Well, when we got done decoratin' after supper, we all walked over to the post-office store to the sale—the whole Circle of us. Because, of course, if the letters was to be sold there wasn't any harm in seein' who got 'em, an' in knowin' just how meanwho was. Then, too, we was interested in what was in the two trunks. We was quite early—early enough to set along on the front rows of breakfast-food boxes that was fixed ready. An' in the very frontmost one was Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' me.
"But we see, first thing when we got into the store, that they was strangers present. The three travellin' men that Mis' Sykes an' I had noticed that afternoon was still in town, of course, an' there they was to the sale, loungin' along on the counter each side o' the cheese. We couldn't bear their bein' there. It was our sale, an' they wasn't rill sure to understand. To us Mr. Pitlaw hed been Mr. Pitlaw. To them he was just somebody that hed been somebody. I didn't like it, nor they didn't none o' the Ladies' Missionary like it. We all looked at each other an' nodded without it showin', like we do, an' we could see we all felt the same.
"Silas was goin' to officiate himself—that man has got the idee it's the whistle that runs the boat. They had persuaded him to open the trunks an' sell the things off piecemeal, an' he see that was rilly the only way to do it. So when the time come he broke open the two trunks an' he wouldn't let anybody touch hasp or strap or hammer but himself. It made me sort of sick to see even the trunk things of Mr. Pitlaw's come out—a pepper an' salt suit, apair of new suspenders, a collar an' cuff case—the kind that you'd recognize was a Christmas present; a nice brush an' comb he'd kept for best an' never used, a cake of pretty-paper soap he'd never opened, a bunch o' keys, an' like that. You know how it makes you feel to unpack even your own things that have been put away a good while; it's like thinkin' over forgot thoughts. Well, an' this was worse. Jem Pitlaw, that none of us had known well enough to mention familiar things to, was dead—he wasdead; an' here we were, lookin' on an' seein' the things that was never out of his room before, an' that he'd put in there, neat an' nice, five years back, to be took out, he thought, in a few weeks. Quite a lot of us felt delicate, but some got behind the delicate idee an' made it an excuse for not buyin' much. They's all kinds to a sale—did you ever notice? Timothy Toplady, for instance—I donno but he's all kinds in his single self. 'Seems he couldn't bring himself to bid on a thing but Jem Pitlaw's keys.
"'Of course nobody knows what they'll fit,' says he, disparagin', 'so to buy 'em don't seem like bein' too familiar with Mr. Pitlaw,' s'he, rill pleased with himself.
"But Mis' Sykes whispers to me:—
"'Them keys'll go dirt cheap, an' Timothy knows it, an' a strange key may come in handyany minute. Timothy's reasons never whip to a froth,' s'she, cold.
"But I guess she was over-critical because of gettin' more fidgety, like we all did, the nearer Silas got to the letters. He hed left the letters till the last. An' what with folks peekin' in the box since he'd brought it down, an' what with handlin' what was ready to spill out, most of 'em by then was in plain sight. An' there I see more o' them same ones—little thin writin', like a woman's. We 'most all noticed it. An' I couldn't keep my eyes off of 'em. 'Seemed like she might be somebody with soft ways that ought to be there, savin' the letters, wardin' off the heartache for Mr. Pitlaw an' mebbe one for herself.
"An' right while I was lookin' Silas turned to the box and cleared his throat, important as if he was the whistle for New York City, an' he lifted up the bunch of the letters that had the little fine writin' on top, just the way Mr. Pitlaw had tied 'em up with common string.
"'Oh!' says Mis' Toplady and Mis' Sykes, each side of me, the one 'oh!' strong an' the other low, but both 'oh's' meanin' the same thing.
"'Now, what,' says Silas, brisk, 'am I bid for this package of nice letters here? Good clear writin', all in strong condition, an' no holes in, just as firm an' fresh,' s'he, 'as the day they was dropped intothe mail. What am I bid for 'em?' he asks, his eyebrows rill expectant.
"Not one of the travellin' men had bid a thing. They had sat still, just merely loungin' each side the cheese, laughin' some, like men will, among each other, but not carin' to take any part, an' we ladies felt rill glad o' that. But all of a sudden, when Silas put up the bunch o' letters, them three men woke up, an' we see like lightnin' that this was what they hed been waitin' for.
"'Twenty-five cents!' bids one of 'em, decisive.
"There was a movement of horror spread around the Missionary Circle at the words. Sometimes it's bad enough to hev one thing happen, but often it's worse to hev another occur. Even Silas looked a little doubtful, but to Silas the main chance is always the main thing, an' instantly he see that these men, if they got in the spirit of it, would run them letters up rill high just for the fun of it. An' Silas was like some are: he felt that money is money.
"So what did he do but begin cryin' the goods up higher—holdin' the letters in his hands, that little, thin writin' lookin' like it was askin' somethin'.
"'Here we hev letters,' says Silas, 'letters from Away. Not just business letters, to judge by the envelopes—an' I allow, gentlemen,' says Silas, facetious, 'that, bein' postmaster of Friendship Village, I'm as good a judge of letters as there is a-goin'.Here we hev some intimate personal letters offered for sale legitimate by their heiress. What am I bid?' asks he.
"'Thirty-five cents!'
"'Fifty cents!' says the other two travellin' gentlemen, quick an' in turn.
"'Seventy-five cents!' cries out the first, gettin' in earnest—though they was all laughin' at hevin' somethin' inspirin' to do.
"But Silas merely caught a-hold of the mood they was in, crafty, as if he'd been gettin' the signers to his petition while they was feelin' good.
"'One moment, gentlemen!' s'he. 'Do you know what you're biddin' on? I ain't told you the half yet,' s'he. 'I ain't told you,' s'he, 'where these letters come from.'
"With that he hitches his glasses an' looked at the postmarks. An' he read 'em off. Oh, an' what do you guess them postmarks was? I'll never forget the feelin' that come over me when I heard what he was sayin', turnin' back in under the string to see. For the stamps on the letters was foreign stamps. The postmarks was foreign postmarks. An' what Silas read off was: Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Singapore—oh, I can't begin to remember all the names nor to pronounce 'em, but I think they was all in India, or leastwise in Asia. Think of it! in Asia, that none of the Ladies' ForeignMissionary Circle hed been sure there was such a place.
"I know how we all looked around at each other sudden, with the same little jump in the chest as when we remember we've got bread in the oven past the three-quarters, or when we've left the preserves on the blaze while we've done somethin' else an' think it's burnin', or when we've cut out both sleeves for one arm an' ain't got any more cloth. I mean it was that intimate, personal jump, like when awful, first-person things have happened. An' I tell you what, when the Ladies' Missionary feels a thing, they feel it strong an' they act it sudden. It's our way, as a Circle. An' in that look that went round among us there was hid the nod that knows what each other means.
"'One dollar!' shouts one o' the travellin' men.
"An' with that we all turned, like one solid human being, straight towards Mis' Postmaster Sykes, that was our president an' a born leader besides, an' the way we looked at her resembled a vote.
"Mis' Sykes stood up, grave an' scairt, though not to show. An' we was sure she'd do the right thing, though we didn't know what the right thing was; but we felt confidence, I know, in the very pattern on the back of her shawl. An' she says, clear:—
"'I'd like to be understood to bid for the wholebox o' Mr. Pitlaw's letters, includin' the bunch that's up. An' I bid five dollars.'
"Of course we all knew in a minute what that meant: Mis' Sykes was biddin' with the proceeds of the Ten Cent Tropical Fête that was to be. But we see, too, that this was a missionary cause if there ever was one, an' they wa'n't one of us that thought it irregular, or grudged it, or looked behind.
"I don't know whether you know how much five dollars rilly is—like you sense it when you've spoke it to a sale, or put it on a subscription paper in Friendship. There wasn't a sound in that store, everybody was so dumfounded. But none was so much as Silas Sykes. Silas was so surprised that he forgot that he was in public.
"'My King!' says he, unexpected to himself. 'What you sayin', Huldy? You ain't biddin' that out o' your allowance, be you?' says he. Silas likes big words in the home.
"'No, sir,' says she, crisp, back, 'I ain't. I can't do miracles out of nothin'. But I bid, an' you'll get your money, Silas. An' I may as well take the letters now.'
"With that she rose up an' spread out her shawl almost broodin', an' gathered that box o' Jem Pitlaw's into her two arms. An' with one motion all the rest o' the Ladies' Missionary got up behind her an' stalked out of the store, like a big bid is sole allthere is to an auction. An' they let us go. Why, there wasn't another thing for Silas Sykes to do but let be as was. Them three men over by the cheese just laughed, an' said out somethin' about no gentleman outbiddin' a lady, an' shut up, beat, but pretendin' to give in, like some will.
"Just before we all got to the door we heard somebody's feet come down off'n a cracker-barrel or somethin', an' Timothy Toplady's voice after us, shrill-high an' nervous:—
"'Amanda,' s'he, 'you ain't calculatin' to help back up this tomfoolishness, I hope?'
"An' Mis' Amanda says at him, over her shoulder:
"'If I was, that'd be between my hens an' me, Timothy Toplady,' says she.
"An' the store door shut behind us—not mad, I remember, but gentle, like 'Amen.'
"We took the letters straight to Mis' Sykes's an' through the house to the kitchen, where there was a good hot fire in the range. It was bitter cold outdoors, an' we set down around the stove just as we was, with the letters on the floor in front o' the hearth. An' when Mis' Sykes hed got the bracket lamp lit, she turned round, her bonnet all crooked but her face triumphant, an' took off a griddle of the stove an' stirred up the coals. An' we see what was in her mind.
"'We can take turns puttin' 'em in,' she says.
"But I guess it was in all our minds what Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says, wistful:—
"'Don't you think,' she says, 'ordoyou think, it'd be wrongin' Mr. Pitlaw if we read over the postmarks out loud first?'
"We divided up the bunches an' we set down around an' untied the strings, an', turn in an' turn out, we read the postmarks off. 'Most every one of 'em was foreign—oh, I can't begin to tell you where. It was all mixed up an' shinin' of names we'd never heard of before, an' names we had heard in sermons an' in the Bible—Egypt an' Greece an' Rome an' isles o' the sea. Mis' Toplady stopped right in the middle o' hers.
"'Oh, I can't be sure I'm pronouncin' 'em right,' she says, huntin' for her handkerchief, 'but I guess you ladies get thefeelo' the places, don't you?'
"An' that was just it: we did. We got the feel of them far places that night like we never could hev hed it any other way. An' when we got all through, Mis' Toplady spoke up again—but this time it was like she flew up a little way an' lit on somethin'.
"'It ain't likely,' she says, 'that we'll ever, any of us, hev a letter of our own from places like these. We don't get many letters, an' what we do get come from the same old towns, over an' over again, an' quite near by. Do you know,' she says, 'I believe this Writin' here'—she held out the tiny finewriting that was like a woman with soft ways—'would understand if we each took one of her letters an' glued it together here an' now an' carried it home an' pasted it in our Bibles.Shewent travellin' off to them places, an' she must have wanted to; an' she would know what it is to want to go an' yet never get there.'
"I think Mis' Amanda was right—we all thought so. An' we done what she mentioned, an' made our choice o' postmarks. I know Mis' Amanda took Cairo.
"''Count of the name sort o' picturin' out a palm tree a-growin' an' a-wavin' against a red sky,' she says, when she was pinnin' her shawl clear up over her hat to go out in the cold. 'Think of it,' she says; 'she might 'a' passed a palm the day she wrote it. Ain't it like seein' 'em grow yourself?'
... "Mebbe it all wasn't quite regular," Calliope added, "though we made over five dollars at the Ten Cent Fête. But the minister, when we told him, he seemed to think it was all right, an' he kep' smilin', sweet an' deep, like we'd done more'n wehaddone. An' I think he knew what we meant when we said we was all feelin' nearer, lion an' lamb, to them strange missionary countries. Because—oh, well, sometimes, you know," Calliope said, "they's things that makes you feel nearer to faraway places that couldn't hev any postmark at all."
Last night in my room there was no sleeping, because the moon was there. It is a south room, and when the moon shines on the maple floor with its white cotton rugs and is reflected from the smooth white walls, to step within is like entering an open flower. Who could sleep in an open flower? I might sleep in a vast white petunia, because petunias do not have as much to say to me as do some other flowers. But in the bell of a lily, as in the bell of the sky or in my moonlit room, I should wish my thought to stay awake and be somebody. Be Somebody. On these nights, it is as if one had a friend in one's head conferring with one. And I think of this comrade as Her, the Custodian of me, who lives deep within and nearly comes outside to this white porch of the moon.
I like to light my candle and watch its warm rays mix with the blue-white beams from without. There would have been a proper employment for a wizard:to diffuse varying insubstantialities, such as these, and to look within them, as within a pool—a pool free of its basin and enjoying the air. Yes, they were an unimaginative race, wizards. When will the era of white art come, with æsthetic witches and wizards who know our modern magics of colour and form and perception as a mere basis for their sorceries? Instead of pottering with thick, slab gruel and mediæval newts' eyes, think what witches they will be! Sometimes I think that they are already arriving. The New Lady told me the most delightful thing about a Thought of hers that she saw ... but it was such an elusive thing to tell and so much of it I had to guess, because words have not yet caught up with fancies, that it is hard to write down. Besides, perhaps you know. And if you did not know, you would skip this part anyway. So I merely mention thatshementioned the coming alive of a thought of hers which helped her spirit to grow, quite without her will. Very likely you understand other wizardries. An excellent place to think them out must be the line where candle rays meet moonbeams, but there is no such discoverable line, just as there is no discoverable line between the seeing and the knowing, where the Custodian dwells.... By all of which I am merely showing you what the moon can do to one's head and that it is no great wonder that one cannot sleep.
"Ain't the moon kind of like a big, shinin' brain," Calliope said once, "an' moonlight nights it gets in your head and thinks for you."
So last night when I went in my room I did not try to sleep; nor did I even light my candle. I went straight to a window and opened it—the one without a screen. I would not live in a house that did not have certain windows which one could open to let in the moon, or the night, or the living out-of-doors, with no screens to thwart their impulse. Suppose that sometime Diana—well, suppose what you will that is sensible, no moon can shine through a screen. Really, it cannot do its best through even an open window. And this was why I gave up trying to make it do so and went downstairs again—which is the earthly and rational of floating out into that utter beauty as I wanted to float.
Of going out into such a night I would like to write for a long time, as I would like to keep on breathing lilies-of-the-valley and never have done. I think, though, that "into" such a night is not the word; to go outuponthe night is the essential experience. For, like a June day, a moonlit night of itself will not let us inside. We must know some other way of entrance. And I suspect that some of us never quite find the way—I wonder if we are missed?
I stepped round the house to the open ocean oflight that broke on soft shores of leaf and line, solemnizing, magnifying. It was like a glimpse into something which, afterward and afterward, is going to be. The definiteness of its premonitory message was startling. As when on seeing once that something had happened on my birthday, 1500, I felt as if I had heard from a kind of twin-time, so now I understood that this night was the birthday of far-off, immortal moments of my own, yet to be lived ... so friendly near we are to the immeasurable kindred.
And there, from the shadow of the flowering currant bush, which just now is out of flower and fallen in meditative quiet—a man arose. My sharp fear, as savage a thing as if the world were ten thousand years younger, or as if I were a ptarmigan and he a cougar—was only momentary. For the cougar began to apologize and I recognized him.
"Why," I said, "Peter."
"Yes'm," said he, "I couldn't help being here—for a little while."
"Neither could I, Peter," I told him.
These were remarkable admissions of ours, for a large part of evening in the village is an uninhabitable part of day and, no matter in what splendour of sky it comes, is a thing to be shut outside experience. If we relate being wakened by something that goes bang, we begin it, "In the middle of thenight, about twelve o'clock;" and, "They have a light in their house 'most every night till midnight," is a bit of sharp criticism not lightly to be lived down. But now it was as if Peter were a part of the time itself, and outlaw too, if the evening was outlaw. "I'm glad I saw you," Peter said—as if we were here met by chance in the usual manner. "I wanted to see you and tell you: I'm going away—to be gone right along."
"Why," I said again, "Peter!"
"You'd go too," he said simply.
"I should want to go," I told him, "but I doubt if I would go. Where are you going?"
"They want to put in a cannery at Marl. It'd be a branch. I'd run it myself."
I did not miss the implication of the conditional mood. AndMarl. What wonderful names they give to some of the towns of this world. That word makes a picture all of white cornices and white wings of buildings and bright façades. I dare say from the railroad track the real town of Marl shows an unpainted livery barn and a blue barber shop, but the name sounds like the name of a chapter of travel, beginning: To-day we drove to Marl to see the queen. Or the cataract. Or the porch of the morning.
"Why are you going, Peter?" I drove in the peg for him.
"I guess you know," he said. "It's all Miggy with me."
I knew that he wanted before all else to tell somebody, to talk to somebody, to have somebody know.
"Tell me, Peter," I said.
And now Peter told me how things were with him. If I should repeat what he said you would be scornful, for it was so little. It was broken and commonplace and set with repetition. It was halting and unfinished, like the unformed writing of a boy. But in his words I felt the movings of life and destiny and death more than I feel them when I think about the rushing of the stars. He loved her, and for him the world became a transparent plane wherein his soul moved as simply as his body. Here was not only a boy longing for a girl. Here was not only a man, instinct with the eager hope of establishing a home. Here was something not unlike this very moon-washed area won from the illimitable void, this area where we stood and spoke together, this little spot which alone was to us articulate with form and line and night sounds. So Peter, stumbling over his confession of love for Miggy, was like the word uttered by destiny to explicate its principle. It mattered not at all what the night said or what Peter said. Both were celestial.
These moments when the soul presses close toits windows are to be understood as many another hint at the cosmic—Dawn, May, the firmament, radio-activity, theistic evolution, a thousand manifestations of the supernal. In this cry of enduring spirit it was as if Peter had some intimacy with all that has no boundaries. I hardly heard his stumbling words. I listened to him down some long avenue of hearths whose twinkling lights were like a corridor of stars.
And all this bright business was to be set at naught because Miggy would have none of it.
"She seems to like me," Peter said miserably, "but I guess she'd like me just as well if I wasn't me. And if I was right down somebody else, I guess she'd like me a good deal better. She—don't like my hands—nor the way my hair sticks up at the back. She thinks of all such things. I wouldn't care if she said all her words crooked. I'd know what she meant."
I knew the difference. To him she was Miggy. To her he was an individual. He had never in her eyes graduated from being a person to being himself.
"Calliope says," I told him, "that she likes almond extract better than any other kind, but that she hardly ever gets a bottle of almond with which she does not find fault. She says it's the same way with people one loves."
Peter smiled—he is devoted to Calliope, whoalone in the village has been friendly with his father.Friendly.The rest of the village has only been kind.
"Well," he tried to put it, "but Miggy never seems to be thinking of me asme, only when she's finding fault with me. If she'd only think about me, even a little, the way I think about her. If she'd only miss me or want me or wonder how the house would seem if we were married. But she don't care—she don't care."
"She says, you know," I ventured, "that she can't ask you to support Little Child too."
"Can't she see," he cried, "that the little thing only makes me love her more? Don't she know how I felt the other night—when she let me help her that way? She must know. It's just an excuse—"
He broke off and his hands dropped.
"Then there's her other reason," he said, "I guess you know that. I can't blame her for it. But even with that, it kind of seems as if,—if she loved me—"
"Yes," I said, "Peter, it does seem so."
And yet in my heart I am certain that the reason is not at all that Miggy cannot love him—I remember the woman-softening of her face that forenoon when she found the spirit of the old romances in the village. I am not even certain that the reasonis that she does not love Peter now—I remember how tender and feminine she was the other night with Peter and Little Child. I think it is only that the cheap cynicism of the village—which nobody means even when it is said!—has taught her badly; and that Life has not yet touched her hand, has not commanded "Look at me," has not bidden her follow with us all.
I looked into the bright bowl of the night which is alternately with one and against one in one's mood of emprise; the bright bowl of the night inverted as if some mighty genii were shaking the stars about like tea-leaves to fortune the future. What a pastimethatfor a wizard!
"Oh, Peter," I said, "ifone were a wizard!"
"I didn't understand," said Peter.
"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.
He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh,don't you wish you could?
In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my head. Perhaps it was theCustodian herself, come outside to that white porch of the moon.
"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."
For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and often understand too late.
He listened to the story as I am setting it down here—the story of the New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair sticks up at the back.
Once upon a time there was a village which might have been called The-Way-Certain-Folk-Want-It-Now. That, however, was not its name—it had a proper, map-sounding name. And there every one went to and fro with a fervour and nimbleness which proved him to be skilfully intent upon his own welfare.
The village had simple buildings and white walls, lanes and flowering things and the flow of pure air. But the strange thing about the town was that there each inhabitant lived alone. Every house had but one inmate and he well content. He liked everything that he owned and his taste was all-sufficient and he took his pleasure in his own walls and loved best his own ways. The day was spent in lonely selling or lonely buying, each man pitted against all others, and advantage and disadvantage were never equal, but yet the transactions were dreary, lacking the picturesqueness of unlicensed spoliation. The only greeting which folk exchangedin passing was, "Sir, what do you do for yourself?" There were no assemblings of the people. The town kept itself alive by accretion from without. When one died another appeared and took his place gladly, and also others arrived, like precept added to precept and not like a true flowering. There were no children. And the village common was overgrown and breast-high with weeds. When the day was done every one retired to his own garden and saw his flowers blossoming for him and answering to the stars which came and stood over his head. There was in the town an epidemic of the intensive, only the people thought of it as the normal, for frequently epidemics are so regarded.
In one soul the contagion did not prevail. The soul was the lad Matthew, whose body lived on the town's only hill. When others sat at night in their gardens Matthew was wont to go up an airy path which he had made to the upper spaces and there wander conjecturing about being alive. For this was a detail which he never could take wholly for granted, in the manner in which he had become wonted to door-mats, napkin-rings, oatmeal, and mirrors. Therefore he took his thought some way nearer to the stars, and there he found so much beauty that he longed to fashion it to something, to create of it anew. And as he opened his heart he began to understand that there is some one ofwhom he was the offspring. As he was companioned by this idea, more and more he longed for things to come nearer. Once, in his walking a hurrying bird brushed his face, grew confused, fluttered at his breast, and as he would have closed it in his hands he found that the bird was gone and his hands were empty, but beneath them his own heart fluttered and throbbed like a thing apart.
One night, so great was the abstraction of the boy, that instead of taking the upper path he fared down into the town. It was a curious way to do—to go walking in the town as if the thing were common property, but then the walls were very high and the gates were fast closed and bound round with creeping things, which grow very quickly. Matthew longed to enter these gardens, and he wondered who lived in the houses and what might be in their hearts.
Amazingly, at the turn of a white wall, a gate was opened and she who had opened it leaned into the night as if she were looking for something. There was a fluttering in the breast of Matthew so that he looked down to see if the bird had come back. But no bird was there. And it smote him that the lady's beauty, and surely her goodness, were great enough so that of them something might be created, as he would fain have created marvels from the sky.
"I would like to make your beauty intosomething other," he said to her. "I cannot think whether this would be a song or a picture or a vision."
She looked at him with as much pleasure as if he had been an idea of her own.
"Tell me about my beauty," she bade him. "What thing is that?"
"Nay, that will take some while," Matthew said. "If I do that, I must come in your garden."
Now, such a thing had never happened in the town. And as this seemed why it never happened, it seemed likely to go on never happening indefinitely. But loneliness and the longing to create and the conjecture about life have always been as potent as battles; and beauty and boredom and curiosity have had something to do with history as well.
"Just this once, then," said the lady, and the gate closed upon the two.
Here was a garden like Matthew's own, but indefinitely atmosphered other. It spoke strangely of a wonted presence, other than his own. In his own garden he fitted as if the space for him were niched in the air, and he went as a man accustomed will go without thinking. But here he moved free, making new niches. And whereas on his own walks and plots he looked with lack-lustre eye as a man looks on his own gas-jet or rain pipe, now Matthew looked on all that he saw as on strange flame and sweet waters. And it was not the shrubsand flowers which most delighted him, but it was rather on a garden bench the lady's hat and gloves and scissors.
"How pleasing!" said he, and stopped before them.
"Do you find them so?" asked the lady.
And when he told her about her beauty, which was more difficult to do than he had imagined and took a longer time, she said:—
"There can be no other man in the world who would speak as you speak."
On which he swore that there was no man who would not speak so, and likewise that no man could mean one-half what he himself meant. And he looked long at her house.
"In those rooms," he said, "you go about. I wish that I could go about there."
But that frightened her a little.
"In there," he said, "are the lamps you light, the plates you use, the brush that smooths your hair. How strange that is."
"Does it seem strange?" she asked.
"Sometime I will go there," said he, and with that he thought that the bird once more was fluttering at his breast. And again there was no bird.
When the time was come that he must leave her, this seemed the most valiant thing to do that ever he had done. It was inconceivable to accept thatthough now she was with him, breathing, sentient, yet in another moment he would be out alone in the empty night. Alone. For the first time the word became a sinister thing. It meant to be where she was not.
"How is this to go on," he said, "I living where you do not live?"
But she said, "Such things have never been any other way," and closed the gate upon him.
It is a mighty thing when one who has always lived alone abruptly finds himself to have a double sense. Here is his little box of ideas, neatly classified, ready for reference, which have always methodically bobbed out of their own will the moment they were mentioned. Here are his own varieties of impression ready to be laid like a pattern upon whatever presents itself to be cut out. Here are his tastes, his sentiments, his beliefs, his longings, all selected and labelled and established. And abruptly ideas and impressions and tastes are thrown into rapt disorder while he wonders what this other being would think, and his sentiment glows like a lamp, his belief embraces the world, his longing becomes only that the other being's longing be cast in counterpart. When he walks abroad, the other's step accompanies him, a little back, and invisible, but as authentic as his own. When he thinks, his thought, without his will, would share itself. All this is anew way of consciousness. All this makes two universes where one universe had previously been competent to support life.
Back on his hill Matthew went through his house as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the garden that he had planted, and she was not walking there. There was his window, and she was not looking from it; his table, and she was not sitting beside it; his book which he could not read for wondering if she had read. All the tools of his home, what could they not become if she touched them? The homely tasks of the cupboard, what joy if she shared them? But what to do? He thought that it might be something if they exchanged houses, so that he could be where she had been, could use what she had used, could think of her in her setting. But yet this did not wholly delight him, either.
And now his house stifled him, so that he rushed out upon that airy path of his that he had made to reach the upper spaces, and he fled along, learning about being alive. Into the night he went, farther than ever he had gone before, till the stars looked nearer to him than houses commonly look, and things to think about seemed there waiting for him.
So it adventured that he came abruptly upon the New Village. It lay upon the air as lightly as ifstrong, fair hands were uniting to bear it up, and it was not far from the stars and the clear places. Before he understood its nearness, the night was, so to say, endued with this village, and he entered upon its lanes as upon light.
This was a town no larger than his own and no more fortuned of Nature. Here were buildings not too unlike, and white walls and flowering things and the flow of pure air. But here was also the touch of bells. And he saw that every one went to and fro in a manner of quiet purpose that was like a garment.
"Sir, what do you do for yourself?" he asked courteously of one who was passing.
The citizen gave him greeting.
"I make bread for my family," said he, "and, it may be, a dream or two."
Matthew tried hard to perceive, and could make nothing of this.
"Your family," he said, "what thing is that?"
The citizen looked at him narrowly.
"I see that you rebuke me," said he, gently; "but I, too, labor for the community, so that the day shall become a better day."
"Community," said Matthew. "Now I know not at all what that may be, either."
Then the man understood that here was one who would learn about these things, and in the NewVillage such a task is sacred and to be assumed on the moment by any to whom the opportunity presents. So the man took Matthew with him.
"Come," he said, "this is the day when we meet together."
"Together," said Matthew, and without knowing why he liked what he felt when he said that.
They went first to the market-place, trodden of many feet, and about it a fair green common planted in gracious lines. Here Matthew found men in shops that were built simply and like one another in fashion, but with pleasant devices of difference, and he found many selling together and many buying, and no one was being robbed.
"How can these things be?" he asked. "Here every man stands with the others."
"Inside of all things," the citizen answered, "you will find that it is so written."
On the common many were assembled to name certain projects and purposes: the following of paths to still clearer spaces, the nurturing of certain people, ways of cleanliness, purity of water, of milk, wide places for play, the fashioning of labour so that the shrines within be not foregone, the freeing of fountains, the planting of green things.
"Why will all this be?" asked Matthew. "For these things a man does in his own garden or for his own house, and no other interferes."
"Nay, but look deep within all things, Friend," the citizen said, "and you will never find it written so."
"Friend," repeated Matthew, "friend...."
Then the citizen went to his own house, and Matthew with him. The wall was no wall, but a hedge, and the garden was very beautiful. And lo, when they went in, there came tumbling along the path little beings made in the image of the citizen himself. And with them a woman of exceeding beauty and power, which the little ones also bore. As if the citizen had chosen her beauty and power to make them into something other.
It was as it had been when the bird was fluttering and beating at the boy's breast, but he did not even heed.
"Tell me!" he cried. "These—do they live here with you? Are they yours?"
"We are one another's," said the citizen.
Matthew sat among them, and to pleasure him they did many sweet tasks. They brought him to eat and drink in the garden. The woman gave quiet answers that had in them something living, and alive, too, some while after she had spoken. ("Soshecould answer," Matthew thought, "and better, too, than that.") And the children brought him a shell, a pretty stone, a broken watch, and a little woolly lamb on three wheels, and the fourthwheel missing. The lamb had a sound to make by squeezing, and this sound Matthew made a great many times, and every time the children laughed. And when they did that Matthew could think of nothing to say that seemed a thing to be said, but he was inscrutably elated, and did the trick again.
And when he rose to take his leave:—
"Is it for them that you make bread and a dream or two?" he asked.
He knew that he should always like to remember the citizen's smile as he answered.
They stood at the opening of the hedge and folk were going by.
"Are they not jealous of you?" Matthew asked.
"They have families and bread and dreams of their own," said the citizen. "Every house is filled with them."
Matthew looked breathlessly along the street of the New Village, and he saw men, as they went, giving one another greeting: "Friend, is much accomplished?" or, "Peace to you, Friend." And they talked together, and entered gardens where were those who came to meet them or who waited within. They were a fine company, moving as to some secret way of being, and as if they had all looked deep within to see how it is written. And as he watched, something in Matthew would have cried out that he, too, was offspring of their Father, thatfor all this had he too been created, and that for this would he live, joying and passioning and toiling in the common destiny. But when he spoke, all that he could say was:—
"Every man, then, may sit down now with a lamb with three wheels and the fourth wheel missing...."
On which he ceased for very shame. But the citizen understood and smiled once more, and said to him: "Come you here again, Brother."
With that word Matthew was off, down from the clear upper spaces, to where, lonely on its hill, his own house stood among its lonely neighbours. And Matthew strode shouting down the deserted streets and calling at every gate; and, it being now day, every one came forth to his lonely toil.
Matthew went and stood on the common where the weeds were high, and so amazed were the folk that they came about him, each suspecting the other of secret connivance in this strange business. For nothing had ever been done so.
"Men and brothers," cried Matthew, "it is not so that it was meant. I pray you look deep within, and see how the meaning was written. Is it that you should live, each pitted against another, wounding the other, advantaging himself? Join now each his hand with that of a neighbour.His neighbour.Make the thing of which, it seems, the world is made;a family. Let the thing come alive which is greater than the family: the community. Oh, my comrades, let us work together for the coming of the kingdom of God."
In the murmur that rose were the words which have been spoken since time began:—
"It is not so that it was done in the old time...."
"It is not seemly that we change...."
"If every one did this ... but we cannot do it alone."
"Have you thought what will become of our business?"
And again and yet again: "It is not so that it was done in the old time."
And when the most would have none of it, Matthew made his way sadly through the throng—of whom were many who smiled (kindly!)—to the edge of the common, where stood a woman, trembling.
"Come," he said.
She went with him, and she with many little frightened breaths, but he had no pity, for he read deep within and saw that it was written that she wanted none. When they reached her own house, she would have entered.
"Go we in here," she besought him, "I will show you the rooms where I go about and the lamps that I light."
"We are past all that now," said Matthew, gently, "I will not go on living where you do not live."
He took her to his own house, through the garden that he had planted. He made her look from his window, sit by his table, open his books; and he bade her to a little task at the cupboard and laughed for joy that she performed it.
"Oh, come away," he cried. "And now we will go quickly to the New Village, that one which I have found or another, where men know all this happiness and more."
But she stood there by Matthew's cupboard and shook her head.
"No," she said gravely, "here we will stay, you and I, in your house. Here we will live—and it may be there is a handful of others who understand. And here we will do what we can."
"But I must show you," Matthew cried, "the way the others live—the things they strive for: the following of paths to clearer spaces, the freeing of shrines."
"All that," she said, "we will do here."
"But," he urged, "you must see how else they do—the shell, the pretty stone, the watch, the woolly lamb on three wheels and one wheel missing...."
"All that," she said, "is in my heart."
Matthew looked in her face and marvelled, for he saw that beside her beauty there was her power, andto that he bowed himself as to a far voice. And again it was as when the bird was at his breast, but now he knew what this would be.
So they live there in Matthew's house. And a handful besides understand and toil for the fairer order. And this will come; and then that New Village, in the clear upper spaces, will hang just above every village—nay, will come down to clothe it like a garment.
When I had done,
"Peter," I said—I nearly called him Matthew!—"these are the things that Miggy does not understand. And that she will understand."